But the narrator is not alone. He initially failed to notice a small man sitting in an ‘obscure corner’ of the waiting room and muffled up in a vast greatcoat. The man – a Mr Blake – begins by questioning the solidity of the waiting room, and of things in general. After warming his hands in the grate under the vast black marble fireplace, he embarks on a ghost story involving a sacked gardener, a suicide, and a scarecrow apparently advancing upon a country house. At the end of it, the narrator sees a train coming in along the adjacent platform, ‘its gliding lighted windows patterning the platform planks. Alas, yet again it wasn’t mine. Still, such is humanity, I preferred my own company just then.’ And he steps out of the waiting room, preferring the ‘dreadful gaseous luminosity of the platform’ to the morbid reminiscences of Mr Blake.
If I ever wrote my own railway ghost story, incidentally, I would be tempted to borrow the title from a work of 1887 by Mary Louisa Molesworth: ‘The Story of the Rippling Train’. This is a ghost story, and I began reading it with excitement, but the train in question turned out to be part of a lady’s dress.
PART FOUR
‘The lighting-up of the theatre’ & ‘The infernal illusion’ or The Crescendo & The Manifestation
THE CRESCENDO
Ghost stories, whether fictional or real, begin with a softening-up process in anticipation of the climactic revelation: a few preliminary, minor shocks, accumulating strangeness.
In ‘The Kit-Bag’ (1908) by Algernon Blackwood, the level-headed young barrister, Johnson, has begun for the first time in his life to ‘feel a little creepy’. Blackwood writes, ‘It is difficult to say exactly at what point fear begins, when the causes of that fear are not plainly before the eyes. Impressions gather on the surface of the mind, film by film, as ice gathers upon the surface of still water, but often so lightly that they claim no definite recognition from the consciousness.’
Professor Richard Wiseman, psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, who believes there’s ‘some interesting science’ to be done about people’s belief in ghosts, was recently quoted in the Scotsman as saying, ‘You become afraid, you become hyper-vigilant, you detect something and then you become even more afraid. When we’re afraid we suddenly become very good at monitoring our environment and our own physiology. That creaking door suddenly becomes important when normally you wouldn’t notice it. And once that happens it becomes a positive feedback loop; you become even more scared, so then even more hyper-vigilant.’
This happened to me after Lizzie had told me the ghost story set down in Part One. I had rashly interviewed her (by phone) while spending the night alone in our dark rented house at the seaside. Lizzie had said she was sweating as she told me the story, and when I went to bed I too began to sweat. It just seemed so very likely that the little girl would speak to me, and the merest hint of a whispered, ‘Hello Andrew’ would have turned the universe on its head. I was sleeping under a duvet and a blanket. I threw the blanket onto the floor, and about three seconds later, I heard a bang from near the bed. Had I, in throwing the blanket into the darkness, disturbed some object on the floor which had then wavered for three seconds before falling over? That had better be it. I also kept seeing a flash of light towards the top of the curtain drawn over the window opposite the bed. Was the curtain moving in the slight breeze from the open window, and so intermittently letting in light from the street? My own room seemed to be conspiring against me, and I was reminded of the M.R. James story (and you really do not want to be reminded of his stories in the small hours) featuring a persecuted man whose own house becomes ‘odious’ to him.
I tried to take comfort from the deep breathing of the sea. But the sea is a ghostly zone, and no ally of the frightened human, and will one day be the death of us all. At 4.30 or so, I heard the birds begin to sing, and I tried to take comfort from that until the sun rose, the room filled with light, and I was able to sleep.
Logically, I suppose that I was haunting myself. In Dickens’s ghost story, ‘The Haunted House’, the protagonist wakes at two in the morning to find he is sharing his bed with a skeleton. ‘I sprang up and the skeleton sprang up also.’ The man, it turns out, is speaking of his own skeleton, and the ghostly visions he pursues are all visions of his own early life. I had got into what Dickens in that story called ‘a ghostly groove’, which can happen just as easily with a number of people as with one individual. ‘Everybody knows how contagious is fear of all sorts’, writes Sheridan Le Fanu in ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’. And group jeopardy is the dynamic of those ghost hunting TV programmes like Most Haunted in which at every lurching shadow or unexplained noise, people grab onto one another, and utter the only exclamation of shock permissible on mainstream TV: ‘Omigod!’
In the state of hyper-vigilance, we become susceptible to the sort of flickering imagery of ghostliness. We have seen from Bram Stoker that ‘the dead travel fast’ and that spiritualism was akin to the speed of radio. The ghost story is a quick medium, stemming as it does from the medieval ballad, which employed a fast turnover of images. The best nineteenth-century ghost stories are full of subliminal images which gives them a modern, filmic quality. In ‘To Be Taken With A Grain of Salt’, the narrator is reading of a murder case:..
‘I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery [of the body] had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper I was aware of a flash – rush – flow – I do not know what to call it, – no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive, – in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed.’
This swiftness is evident in the title of a story of 1896 by Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘When I Was Dead’ (and the best thing about it is the title). Perhaps the most compressed opening to a ghost story is the following from ‘The Man of Science’ (1892) by Jerome K. Jerome…
‘I met a man in the Strand one day that I knew very well, as I thought, although I had not seen him for years. We walked together to Charing Cross, and there we shook hands and parted. Next morning, I spoke of this meeting to a mutual friend, and then I learnt, for the first time, that the man had died six months before.’
(Unfortunately the narrator then changes the subject and goes onto another, less interesting ghostly theme.)
It seems to me that we will not have time to guard against the instantaneous revelation. We can spend a lifetime learning the laws of rationality, and they will be undone in less than a second. But we will try if at all possible to shore them up, as I did alone in our rented house at the seaside; and in the early stages of ghost stories the central character will try to muster the forces of sanity and normality.
Scratching behind the skirting board will generally be put down to rats (a much less innocent explanation after the rodent-infested Great War than it had been before), whilst the flitting figure is an optical illusion or, as the Victorians more poetically had it, ‘an ocular delusion’. A favourite of mine is from the accounts of phenomena at Borley Rectory. One of Price’s academic observers felt a distinct tap on his shoulder while standing in the garden. He turned around, and there was nobody there. He surmised that it might have been ‘a very heavy moth’. Here are half a dozen similar instances of wishful thinking or….
Six Attempts at Putting on a Brave Face
1. In The Lost Stradivarius (1895) by John Meade Falkner (which, along with The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, is one of the few successful ghost novels), John Maltravers, an Oxford student, senses a presence in his room every time he plays the Gagliarda (a fast and complicated dance) from a certain Italian violin suite of the mid-eighteenth century. In particular he seems to hear the sound of someone sitting down in the wicker chair in his room when he begins the suite, and then rising from it when he has finished. But, seeing nothing, he d
ecides ‘…that there must be in the wicker chair osiers responsive to certain notes of the violin, as panes of glass in church windows are observed to vibrate in sympathy with certain tones of the organ.’ (The Gagliarda, incidentally, symbolises the allure of a sort of aristocratic paganism, a dangerously seductive alternative to the crassness of evangelical Christianity).
2. In A Christmas Carol (1843), Scrooge declares to the ghost of his erstwhile business partner, Marley, that he does not believe in him even though he can see him. Marley asks, ‘Why do you doubt your senses?’ ‘Because,’ said Scrooge, ‘a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!’
3. In ‘The Haunters and The Haunted’ (1859) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the unnamed narrator has rented a known-to-be-haunted house situated a little way north of Oxford Street in hopes of seeing something ‘perhaps excessively horrible’. He is in one of the drawing rooms with his manservant when a chair spontaneously moves. ‘Why, this is better than the turning tables’, chuckles the new tenant, even as his dog begins howling in its distress. He surmises, ‘…we have jugglers present, and though we may not discover their tricks, we shall catch them before they frighten us.’
4. In ‘A View From a Hill’ (1925) by M.R. James, Mr Fanshawe, who is of course ‘a man of academic pursuits’ is holding some old, peculiarly heavy binoculars he has come by while out walking in the country with his host, Squire Richards. Looking through these, at a certain hill called Gallows Hill, he clearly sees what he describes as ‘a dummy gibbet and a man hanging on it.’ Squire Richards responds that there’s nothing on the hill but a wood and, looking again without the binoculars, Fanshawe sees that this is right: ‘It must be something in the way this light falls.’
…Which is as near as I can come to finding the familiar, but in fact elusive, explanation, ‘It must be a trick of the light.’
5. In ‘A Visitor from Down Under’ by L.P. Hartley, which was published in a collection called The Ghost Book, edited by Walter de La Mare in 1932, we are on the top deck of an open-topped bus ‘making its last journey through the heart of London before turning in for the night’. The loquacious bus conductor encounters a silent, pale passenger with hat pulled down and collar up. ‘Jolly evening,’ says the conductor. (He is being ironic; it is wet and foggy). There is no reply from the passenger, who holds up his fare between the fingers of stiff, apparently immobile fingers. The conductor takes the money and goes back downstairs. Later, the mysterious passenger is not there. The conductor never saw him come down the stairs, but he rationalises the situation with a very good example of sceptical wishful thinking: ‘He must have got off with that cup-tie crowd’.
6. Early on in The Green Man by Kingsley Amis, which is another of the few successful ghost novels, Maurice Allington, the alcoholic landlord of the Green Man pub (he’s on two bottles of whisky a day), sees a mysterious female figure in a part of the pub not open to the public. He turns aside for a moment to attend to other business, and when he looks back, she’s gone. Later, the subject of this woman comes up in conversation: ‘I realised for the first time that I had not subsequently seen that woman in the bar or the dining room or anywhere round the house. No doubt she had found the ladies’ lavatory on the ground floor, and left while I was busy standing in for Fred…’
In real life, the rational explanation, on being earnestly sought is usually found. But perhaps it is a mistake to seek it. I myself would have a whole volume of ghost stories if I hadn’t double checked.
Here are:
Two Ghosts that Rationality Dispelled
1. The Late William
William was a friend of mine who drank too much. I mean, most of my friends drink too much, but William seemed suicidal in the amount he put away. He lived, and died, in a house that lay between my own house and my local high street. His front door opened directly on to the pavement, and I would often pass by just as he was stepping out of his house on his way to the pub. A year ago as I write, he came home from the pub, closed the door behind him, and collapsed in his hallway. The discovery of his body a few days later caused a big sensation in my area. It wasn’t surprising that William had died, but he was such a garrulous, omnipresent figure in the local pubs and also (especially early in the evening) a very engaging talker, that his absence was keenly felt.
A month or so after his death, I was walking quickly past William’s house when the front door opened, and he stepped onto the pavement. In the time it took me to see this, and to register the shock, I had moved a couple of paces beyond his door. I stopped, turned round, thinking: ‘I know he’s dead because I read his obituary last week’, and stared at the man in the doorway. It wasn’t William – not quite. It was a man who looked like him, and he was jangling the door keys in an official sort of way. He might have been an estate agent, or someone looking after William’s estate or effects. So I had killed a good ghost story by turning back around. Another time, I did the same thing by waiting…
2. The Boarded-Over Grave
I was walking home from the pub, heading north along Swain’s Lane, which divides the two equally ghostly parts of Highgate Cemetery. It was about 11.30pm. Looking through the railings of the cemetery, I eyed the statue on a headstone of a small boy. As usual, he faced away, with a tension about his shoulders, just as though he might turn around at any moment. As is also usual with me, I stood still for a moment and dared the little blighter to turn around. He did not, thank God. I then noticed a grave was apparently being worked on in some way, and was covered with a six foot long piece of chipboard. As I looked on, the chipboard slowly lifted up. I held my ground, fighting off the heart attack that might be imminent, and…a fox crept out from the chipboard. That wasn’t quite the end of the matter, since the fox sauntered up to the railings, and stared fixedly at me as if to say: ‘You’re a coward, aren’t you?’
*
In Rudyard Kipling’s ‘My Own True Ghost Story’ (1888) the narrator occupies a bungalow in India, and hears billiards being played in a room he knows to be empty. He is then informed by a servant that the place is indeed haunted. In the course of further enquiries, he discovers that this servant is prone to inventing ghost stories. Emboldened by this, the narrator listens hard when the billiards next start up, and pins the noise down to ‘the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt’. But he is half-regretful at the resolution: ‘Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made ANYTHING out of it.’
POLTERGEISTS
There is what Brian Inglis called a ‘strong family likeness’ between poltergeists, and they have behaved in the same way over thousands of reported incidents across the world. They are also very plausible ghosts. They are a fine, counter-intuitive solution to the question of how a supernatural agency should behave. They make no attempt to embody the momentous implications of ghostliness. Instead, they specialise in irritating people. On the face of it, their repertoire is pathetically limited: they bang on floors and walls, pull hair, inflict minor blows, shift objects from place to place, speak (usually the same words over and over again), unmake beds, lift beds up, deposit debris on beds, and generally take a strong interest in beds. They are like the child who knocks on your door and then runs away, and part of your exasperation comes from trying to work out why they bothered. They are childish, or like petulant adolescents, and their presence in a house is often associated with the presence of adolescents or others experiencing emotional turmoil.
In fictional ghost stories, poltergeists usually play an ancillary role; they are the supporting act, creating the correct climate of fear for the main attraction: the manifestation. The poltergeists themselves generally do not manifest, being (as a rule) invisible. But they’re often more frightening than the star turn.
Five Poltergeists
1. Tedworth
&nbs
p; The template was set by the earliest well-known poltergeist haunting, which is a sort of paradigm of childishness or petty spitefulness…
In the mid-1600s, a magistrate called Mr John Mompesson who lived at Tedworth in Wiltshire, which is now called Tidworth (even that name change is petty) confiscated and impounded a drum belonging to a man called William Drury. Drury was in effect a busker, who had been intimidating people into paying money for his performances on the drum. He was given over to the custody of a local constable, but soon released. However, he wanted his drum back, and John Mompesson wouldn’t give it to him.
The story of what then occurred in Mr Mompesson’s house was told a couple of decades later in ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus’ (1681), by Joseph Glanvill, who had visited the house and observed, or overheard, the haunting for himself. (The title is a refutation of the supposed beliefs of the New Testament-era Jewish sect, the Sadducees, who were said to have denied the immortality of the soul).
The house began to echo to the sound of knocking and drumming, especially in the small hours, and around the room where the confiscated drum was kept. The ingredient of emotional turmoil was perhaps supplied by Mrs Mompesson, who was in an advanced state of pregnancy when the disturbances began. (Others pointed the finger at a certain servant girl). Before the bursts of sound, the occupants would hear a ‘hurling sound in the air over the house’. When Mrs Mompesson left the house to give birth, the noises ceased. But they resumed more intensely when she returned with the baby. Chairs ‘walked’ around rooms; the phrase ‘a witch, a witch’ was repeated more than a hundred times. Part of a bedstead was thrown, but fell as lightly as ‘a lock of wool’. In his commentary on the haunting, Peter Underwood states of this article, ‘It was noticed that it stopped exactly where it landed on the floor, not rolling or moving at all.’ I have seen that kind of stopped motion when watching a scratched DVD, and it is quite disturbing enough then. The motion of objects thrown by poltergeists has consistently been reported as being slower and more controlled than the laws of physics would allow. (From Borley Rectory, Harry Price reported that objects must have flown around corners in order to move from their starting points to their end points.)
Ghoul Brittania Page 11